As KDE3 is again part of the official openSUSE 12.1 repositories (thanks to all who made this happen), I took the chance to create an installable livecd. Besides a preconfigured KDE3 desktop, it contains additional software like Mozilla Firefox, Thunderbird and LibreOffice. YaST2 is available for administrative tasks like system configuration or software management. The media does not contain all language packs due to size limitations, but they could be easily installed. The KDE3 language packages are named kde3-i18n-$LANG, e.g. kde3-i18n-eo.

In order to to emphasize the feeling of good old times, the artwork is based on SUSE 10.1. The kde3-gtk-qt-engine is included to give a unique experience over GTK and QT applications and KDE4 applications make use of the Plastique widget style and Plastik colors.

The x86_64 and the i686 iso images have been created using the kiwi tools. You can download the kiwi description and build your customized version. Just make sure you have kiwi and kiwi-config-openSUSE-12.1 installed and run create_livecd.sh from the archive. (You can adjust the image_arch variable within the script according to your build architecture)

If you got any further questions concerning KDE3 on openSUSE, please take a look at the openSUSE KDE3 wiki page and join the mailinglist.

As some of you might already have noticed, we are working on a better integration of Xfce in openSUSE. The aim of the Xfce Project is to establish Xfce as well-accepted desktop environment besides GNOME and KDE. We have already started building Xfce LiveCDs with KIWI but still fail in getting yast-live to work.

Besides that we had some success in the re-design process, so this is how the upcoming Xfce in openSUSE might look like:

Miguel Cruz has provided his great CrashBit theme and designed a few new icons to improve Xfce support.

I have also finished a SLiM Display Manager theme and work on some packages for that. There is still a lot of work to be done and things to coordinate. We are going to set up a oS Xfce Mailing List soon, that all interested people should join. In the near future I am continuing to blog about the current development process, so stay tuned.